Rates - what should they be?

[ShanBoi]

Heya,

I never know what the rates and shit do, and as such i never know what to set them as. In 1.6 i just asked my mate and wrote what he said, but he doesnt have CSS yet hehe.

So basically - what rates should i use to get the best performance?


My setup

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Radeon 9600XT - 256MB
Asus K8V Deluxe Mobo
1024MB PC3200 DDR Kingston Value Ram

Cable Internet. My ping goes as low as 10, but generally hovers around 20 - 40 if that helps...

what are the important rates, and what should they be!

 

[perrkele]

Ok, here goes. Rate commands:

rate
cl_updaterate
cl_cmdrate

Other important stuff:
cl_interp
net_graph 3

Basically the idea is to have as high rates as you can without getting choke (net_graph 3 lets you see choke/loss/fps etc). The CPL, for example, uses rate 25000, cl_updatarate 101, cl_cmdrate 101 and cl_interp 0.01 for their LAN tournaments. However, playing conditions on Internet are obviously often a bit different, and thus you can't always use rates as high as those. It boils down to both the speed of your connection and the server you're playing on.

Oh, and cl_interp has to do with the client side prediction stuff, and at least in 1.6 the value for cl_interp (or ex_interp as it is in 1.6) should be 1 / updaterate. I assume it's the same thing with CS:S, seems to work for me at least. So, for example, with an updaterate of 101, your interp should be 1/101 ~ 0.01. In 1.6 setting ex_interp to 0 would automagically adjust the interp to the correct value when you changed your updaterate, saving you the trouble of counting it yourself. I haven't tested it out in CS:S, though.

I've got a pretty decent connection (10mb) and I can easily use 25k, 101, 101 without any problems on most servers. Earlier I had a 1mb homePNA connection, and I was using those same rates then as well. Basically just try the LAN rates and see if it works. If you get assloads of choke, go down bit by bit with rate, updaterate and cmdrate. Try different combinations until you find the best ones for your connection/server you're playing on.

I hope that helps!

 

[KiNG]

http://www.steampowered.com/forums/...4&highlight=best+clcmdrate+clupdaterate+rates

it explains the netcode and rates somewhat, here is my setup.

rate 20000
cl_rate 20000
cl_cmdrate 101
cl_updaterate 60 (my avg fps)
cl_smooth 0
cl_interp 0.05
fps_max 101

with these rates it feels like 1.6 to me, hope your luck is as good as mine.

oh and read through a few pages of that thread i found it very useful and informative.